July 31, 2008

Crowdsourcing Obama's Exams

Like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, Barack Obama’s past
has been laid bare for Internet gawkers everywhere. But that may be where any similarity
ends.

Instead of Inside
Edition and Perez Hilton, Obama has been scrutinized by the New York Times and legal eagles Akhil
Amar, Randy Barnett, John Eastman, and Pam Karlan. Fortunately for Obama, the
past under review has received largely glowing reviews.

The precise target of the scrutiny is Obama’s 1994 syllabus
for a seminar and, more strikingly, his late Nineties through early 2000s exams
and model answers for constitutional law.

The blogosphere is alight with commentary on Obama’s course
materials and what this reveals about Obama.

I don’t want to focus on the quality of those papers and
what they allow us to predict about Obama today, but rather on what this story
reveals about (1) the New York Times
and the way news is processed and received in the Web 2.0 era; and (2) the
precariousness of our privacy today.

1. Little remarked on is the fact that the New York Times not only found these documents, but posted them
online. We may have begun to take this approach as a given and wondered if the Times had not posted them. But the Times went further: after its story had
run, it invited four constitutional law scholars with diverse political
perspectives to review the materials and blog about them. At the same time, it
invited us all to review and comment on them.

I want to suggest that the documents are far more important
than the Times story. I suspect that
overall, the reviews of Amar and company, and the reviews of average citizens,
will have a greater impact on people’s appraisal of Obama than the reported
story itself. This is not to deny the usefulness of the reporting, which must
have involved many interviews and research into arcane law school minutiae and
constitutional doctrine. We can receive a diverse set of expert opinions and
review them directly, and then test them ourselves against the original
documents. Now that we can see for
ourselves, we can also judge for ourselves.

In a pre-Internet era, we would not have seen the actual
documents, and would then have been stuck with reporters’ accounts and,
perhaps, their discussions with experts. Were it not for the electronic form
and computer networks, the Times
might never have discovered his old exams as law schools typically do not hang
on to these indefinitely. Specifically, these documents are now (1) computer
data and thus more persistent; and (2) sometimes available on a webpage
intended to be accessible to current students and thus more widely available
than exams in a locked file drawer. The Times
does not reveal its source for the documents here. Recall that we were never
treated to either Bill or Hillary Clinton’s old exams (they too were once law
professors).

The Times itself
is able to tap professors to offer comments—in full, in their own words,
without the reporter taking a snippet here and there to advance the paper’s storyline.

Cass Sunstein has worried about the echo chambers that the
Internet and the blogosphere, specifically, might create, corroding the
national discourse. But I think that this event shows how people on the left
and the right might engage in a single conversation. The documents will always
ground the conversation; mischaracterizations will find immediate challenge.

This process, of course, requires the expenditure of time
and energy, and the inclination to spend such time and energy towards such a
goal. But my instinct is that there will be a wide array of folk, on all sides,
who read these materials directly. Many of the readers may be partisans, hoping
to prove their side right, but the availability of the documentary evidence
will make arguments more responsible.

Instead of “All the news that’s fit to print,” perhaps the Times might adopt the online motto, “All
the documents that are fit to PDF”?

2. Another question raised by this incident is that it
reveals how exposed we all are. Paris Hilton here becomes the canary in a coal
mine. Old documents (or other recordings in digital form) can be dredged up
with a few mouse clicks and circulated to the world instantaneously. Most
professionals do not do their job expecting front page review or Internet
postings.

Of course, Obama has invited this on himself by running for
the highest office in the country (as has McCain). There is little privacy left
for this office, as Ken Starr ensured in an early Internet episode.

My concern is that the public exposure will not necessarily
be reserved for American presidential candidates. Two worries come to mind: (a)
fear of future exposure of our current actions may make us too meek; and (2)
actions in the past may have an excessive influence on perception today. Are
these real concerns? Are individuals trimming their sails too much for fear of
future reputational damage? Are past actions haunting us inappropriately? If
so, how should we deal with these problems?

Comments

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Prof. Chander,

I'm most interested in your second point, about the vulnerability we all face given the ease of reproduction of digital information about ourselves.

For those of us who are information workers and therefore necessarily spend a great deal of our time online, it is inevitable that we will leave digital traces, or a data shadow. Between blog posts, Amazon reviews, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, I have to accept a certain amount of risk that one of these things may someday come back to bite me.

As a result, I am pretty cautious about what I post (and advise colleagues and clients to do the same) -- I try never to post anything that I wouldn't want my mother, my boss, or a potential client to read, see, or hear.

Of course, this doesn't preclude someone else from posting incriminating or embarrassing information about me online. The solution to that problem, I think, is to take control of the stream of information available about yourself by contributing to it, not by running from it and allowing others to define your web presence (Wired just had an interesting piece about Julia Allison, who has ridden this strategy to a kind of seedy, Paris Hilton-like internet fame [see http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/magazine/16-08/howto_allison ]).

Basically, at the end of the day, I want to be sure that when someone Googles me, my website is at the top of the list; avoiding the creation of a data shadow only provides others with license to create one for you.

Actually, the New York Times did (implicitly) reveal its source for these exams, which are normally password-protected and limited to those affiliated with the University of Chicago -- the post on the Times' website contains a line that notes, "additional reporting contributed by..." and that person is a Chicago student.

I have emailed Mr. Obama concerning continuing constitutional, civil and human rights violations that have occured in my life over the last 18 years with a collaborative effort by the government to keep those violations quiet. There has been no response from his camp. I understand that there are bigger fish to fry. State of Indiana v Edwin Jones 49G069001CF007921